The History of the Post Office in British North America

by William Smith

Subject to the approval of the postmaster general, the deputies opened all post offices, appointed all postmasters and other officers of the department, and made all contracts for the conveyance of the mails. Until Stayner's time, the department at home exercised a watchful oversight in one particular. It insisted that the deputy postmaster general should not extend the system, or increase the accommodation within it, unless he could satisfy St. Martins-le-Grand that the additional outlay required should be met by a corresponding increase in the revenue. Assured on this point, the department gave the deputies a practically free hand.

Insistence on the point of finances brought the general post office into sharp collision with the colonial legislatures for a number of years. But shortly after Stayner's assumption of office, the department in London loosened the reins, and directed him to study the wants of the rising communities, and extend postal accommodation to whatever districts seemed to him to require it.

The confidence bestowed by the postmaster general on his young deputy in the Canadas was not misplaced. Stayner was a man of energy and authority, who had grown up in the service under the administration of his father-in-law, who was his predecessor in office, and his loyalty to the interests of both the postmaster general and the community he served stood unquestioned. With his appointment to his high office, he fell heir to a dispute which had been waged for a number of years between the general post office and the legislatures of Upper and Lower Canada, involving the legal right of the post office to do business in the colonies under existing conditions.

Stayner was fortunate in finding in each province differences between the administration and the houses of assembly, which gave little promise of settlement, and he promptly attached himself to the side of the administration. This, indeed, was the only course open to him, in view of his accountability to a department, which, in according him a certain freedom of action, took jealous heed that he should not abuse it.

But Stayner had important interests of his own, which called for protection by the government. His extra-official emoluments—from the postage on newspapers, and from his agency for the collection of United States postage, due in Canada—now far exceeding his official salary, began to excite public attention, and he required all the support he could gather to himself, to enable him to brave it out with the assemblies, when they insisted on his showing by what right he took these emoluments.

His position, however repugnant to popular notions, was officially unassailable, and as he managed to identify his interests with those of the administrations, the governors of the two provinces remained steadily his friends and protectors. He had even the gratification of being commended for his great services by the assembly of Upper Canada in 1837.

But a change was coming for Stayner, and indeed had come. Ever since the amount and the sources of his income became known to the home government, there had been disapprobation. The secretary of the post office, a large part of whose income had been derived from similar extra-official sources, deprecated the criticism which began to spring up, and the postmaster general weakly and reluctantly agreed that Stayner's exceptional services entitled him to exceptional emoluments.

The colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, however, was of another mind. The two provinces were seething with dissatisfaction, and it was not clear to him in what the grievances of the colonials consisted. A committee of the house of commons had sat in 1828, heard evidence, and reported, and the leaders of the assembly in Lower Canada had declared that if the recommendations of the committee were carried into effect, the province would be content.

Guiding his policy by that report, and seeking every opportunity to make good its findings, the colonial secretary observed that the political dissatisfaction and unrest, so far from disappearing, was spreading year by year. His bewilderment sharpened his eyes, and as they rested on Stayner's case, he saw a condition which offended his sense of justice, and he at once demanded of the postmaster general that he should remove this obvious wrong.

For a time Stayner's tactics, or his luck, held him scatheless. The postmaster general and the colonial secretary had agreed that the remedy for all the ills that afflicted the post office was to be provided by the bill adopted by the imperial parliament in 1834. This bill, however, could not become operative until the acceptance by the several colonial legislatures of a common measure for the regulation of the post office in the several provinces by the postmaster general of England. As all the colonies had rejected this measure, the situation remained unchanged.